Saline's old Ford plant ran on river water and soybeans

Henry Ford believed the car of the future would be partly grown on a farm, and on the western edge of Saline he spent real money trying to prove it. The brick complex on Michigan Avenue had been a mill site since 1845, when David Schuyler Haywood built a gristmill there on the creek and a little settlement called Barnegat grew up around it. By the 1860s the business had faded and the mill went quiet.

Ford bought the site in 1936, rebuilt it, and reopened it in 1938 as one of his “village industries” — small plants set on country rivers and run on water power, so a farm family could earn factory wages a few miles from home without giving up the land. He scattered a couple dozen of them across southeast Michigan’s rivers. The Saline plant did something very Ford: it processed soybeans. Workers pressed the beans into oil for paint and into an early plastic that Ford molded into car parts — horn buttons, distributor housings, knobs, switch handles. A Michigan crop, turned into a Michigan dashboard.

When the war came, the plant pivoted. Crews machined parts for Pratt & Whitney aircraft engines alongside the soybean work, the kind of small-town arsenal that quietly fed the bigger plants up the road. But the village-industries idea was really Ford’s personal enthusiasm, and it didn’t outlive him by much. He died in 1947, and the Saline plant closed that same year. The equipment was obsolete within fifteen years.

The building outlasted all of it. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1996, the old Schuyler Mill still stands at the west end of Saline — a tidy brick monument to the moment the man who built the Model T bet a piece of his fortune on the humble soybean.